


Heartburn, Baby

by saturnalyia



Category: TWICE (Band), 방탄소년단 | Bangtan Boys | BTS
Genre: Break Up, Canon Compliant, Casual Sex, F/M, Friends With Benefits, Post-Break Up, Sleeping Together, idolverse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-04
Updated: 2019-08-04
Packaged: 2020-07-31 01:49:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20107192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saturnalyia/pseuds/saturnalyia
Summary: Jeongyeon reflects on her failed relationship with Jimin, and what it might mean now that they're sleeping together again.





	Heartburn, Baby

**Author's Note:**

> Written for GG Jukebox Round 1, inspired by Happy Not Knowing by Carly Rae Jepsen

**** Jeongyeon stares at her reflection in the mirror. Mascara from the night before, lightly smudged beneath her eyes. What a cliché. He had offered her makeup wipes, but she'd declined. 

She tries to comb her fingers through her hair, but gets stuck in tangles, so she leaves it be. It's longer now than it was when she'd first met him. 

"Jeongyeon?" A soft knock on the bathroom door. "Everything okay in there?"

She turns the tap on for a couple of seconds, then turns it back off. When she opens the door, Jimin's standing right outside. He's pulled a t-shirt on, but the neckline is wide, and she can see the marks she'd left on his collarbone last night.

"Aren't you not supposed to ask a girl what she's doing in the bathroom?" she asks sardonically, stepping past him and picking her jeans up off the floor. She's hyper-aware of the fact that she's just in her panties, and even though her shirt is large and covers most of her up, there's still a lot of leg on display. Not that he hasn't seen it all before. Last night, and all the nights before.

Jimin sits on the edge of the bed and watches her. "I thought we'd be past social niceties." There's a lilt to his voice that makes Jeongyeon think he's teasing, but she isn't sure. She's lost her touch with him, after all this time.

"Don't know why you'd think that," she replies. Tugs her jeans on and does up the button. She can feel his eyes on her. Her ass looks good in these jeans, she knows that. Part of her wants to call him out for staring, but another part of her wants him to stare. 

"Sorry, should I be calling you Jeongyeon-ssi?" 

She snatches her leather jacket off the back of the chair where she'd thrown it, and turns to him with her eyes narrowed. "Don't get sassy with me, Park Jimin."

Jimin just grins at her. It's charming. She knows it, he knows it, the whole bloody world knows it. 

Jeongyeon scowls.

"Do you want to go out for dinner this weekend?" he asks, without preamble. 

She freezes. "What?"

He shrugs. "Dinner. This weekend. You in?"

She shoves one foot into her boot, then the other. "Like a date?"

"If you want."

If she wants. Jeongyeon stares at Jimin, leaning back on his hands, looking up at her with that open expression on his face. Even though he's not open, not at all. He's one of the most closed-off people she's ever met.

She picks up her bag off the ground, slings it onto her shoulder. 

"Nah," she says. "No thanks."

  
  


* * *

  
  


He was the one who'd asked her out first. Funny, that. 

It was something like four years ago. She was still a rookie, and he was already fairly successful (albeit not in the same overwhelming way that he is now). They'd meet sometimes at music shows, and he'd chat with her backstage, compliment her on her singing, tell her jokes about the industry and all the people in it. They just hit it off, more so than he did with any of her group members, and it made her feel special. She was young, and new, and even his few years of experience on her felt like decades.

So when he asked for her number, she didn't hesitate. Even though Momo never stopped teasing her about it, and even though she pretended to be annoyed by all the snarky comments Nayeon made.

They didn't call it anything, but they didn't need to. They would text late into the night, or he'd call her sometimes just because he missed her voice (she liked it when he told her that). And if they were lucky their managers would ferry one of them to the other one's dorm, and they would kick their roommates out so they could be alone. 

He wasn't her first, and she wasn't his. But this was serious in a way that things had never been for her before, and she wasn't quite ready for it.

The first time he told her that he loved her, she cried.

  
  


* * *

  
  


"You should go say hi to him."

Jeongyeon gives Nayeon a look. "And why would I do that?" They're backstage for a long day of recording at one of the music shows, and Jeongyeon would be lying if she said her eyes hadn't been searching Jimin out in every room. But only subconsciously. Some habits are hard to break, no matter how much time has passed.

He's not far from them now, huddled with his members in their impossible-to-miss pink outfits. Jeongyeon doesn't see why she has to say hi to him when he hasn't even come to say hi to her.

She doesn't say this to Nayeon, though, because it would make it seem like she's keeping score. Which would suggest that she cares. But she doesn't. Care, that is. If she is keeping score it's only because she wants to win.

Nayeon rolls her eyes. In the dim light of backstage, it would be hard to see, but Nayeon throws her whole head back in an exaggerated way meant to obviously convey her displeasure at Jeongyeon. "I don't get why you're being so cold when you obviously like him."

_ Hah.  _ "I do not like him."

"Then why are you sleeping with him again?" Nayeon says this like she's slapped down a trump card. But she hasn't, because Jeongyeon's asked herself this same question before, every single day for the last few weeks, and she knows what her answer is.

"Because the sex is good."

Nayeon scrunches up her nose and grins at Jeongyeon. Mischief glints in her eyes. "You know what they say about sleeping with ex-boyfriends…"

Jeongyeon raises one eyebrow. "Do it, but only if the sex is good?"

This is not the answer Nayeon wants to hear. She smacks Jeongyeon on the shoulder, more forcefully than necessary. Jeongyeon pulls a face at her.

"It didn't work out between us the first time," she says flatly, "and it's not going to work out this time."

"Maybe it will," Nayeon insists. She's persistent, if nothing else.

But Jeongyeon knows herself, and she knows Jimin. 

She doesn't realise she's staring at him, until he suddenly looks up, and their eyes meet. He smiles at her, and nods his head in hello. Jeongyeon feels the flip of surprise in her stomach. She shoots him a close-lipped smile.

When he looks away, she turns back to Nayeon, who's watching her with undisguised curiosity. Jeongyeon elbows her in the ribs.

"I'm not the girl for him," she says. 

Nayeon hums thoughtfully. "You keep telling yourself that," she says, "and maybe one day you'll believe that you don't want to be."

  
  


* * *

  
  


How does a relationship break down? Slowly, Jeongyeon thinks. A gradual accumulation of moments that each seems insignificant, until one day you're standing on a mountain of problems with no idea how to get back down to solid ground.

There's a moment, somewhere in the middle, that Jeongyeon remembers. It doesn't mean anything, and yet somehow, it does.

In this memory:

She's sitting on her bed, scrolling through twitter. They're encouraged to stay off the app, but Jeongyeon figures it's okay as long as she's not searching up her own name. So she types in Jimin's name instead.

He's on tour. Not a huge one but they're headed to multiple stops around Asia, and it's still a pretty big deal. Jeongyeon's barely seen him for months now, what with tour preparations and rehearsals and now the tour itself.

She thought that watching fancams of him performing would make her feel better, but it doesn't. She stares mutely at the broad grin plastered across his face, and realises with a plummeting sensation in her stomach that she can't remember the last time he'd smiled at her like that.

Momo comes into the room, crawls into bed with her. "Jeongyeonnie," she mumbles sleepily, tucking herself under Jeongyeon's arm. "What are you doing?"

"Twitter." Jeongyeon tilts the screen so Momo can see. "Jimin's on tour."

"Hmm," Momo says. She shifts so she can take a closer look, idly tapping on a couple of the videos as she scrolls. When the music blares out of her phone's tinny speakers, Jeongyeon presses furiously on the 'volume down' button until the video goes mute. Momo peers up at her. "Do you miss him?"

"I guess," Jeongyeon replies. She knows she should say yes, because isn't that what people do, when their lovers are away? Miss them? But all she feels is this hollowness in her chest that she doesn't think he would be able to fill, even if he was here.

"I don't think Jimin misses me," she says, suddenly, and it's only as she says the words that she realises how long they've been festering inside her. Jeongyeon stares at the freeze frame of Jimin's beaming face as he stands on stage, waves to the crowd. "He has his career, and his members. And his fans. I don't think I matter to him, in the end."

Momo doesn't try to argue with this, or even to pry. She just wraps her arms around Jeongyeon's waist, rests her head on Jeongyeon's chest, and sighs. Jeongyeon pulls her into a hug, her chin nestled onto of Momo's head.

That was it. That was the moment she knew.

  
  


* * *

  
  


After they broke up, she didn't speak to him for years. She'd been angry, absolutely furious, for a while. But then the anger faded into sadness, and then enough time passed that the sadness faded into apathy.

(Beneath the apathy, in a deep, dark place where Jeongyeon never looked, was the fact that she'd never really gotten over him.)

He was the one who came up to her, after the end of year awards show, to congratulate her on Twice's  _ daesang. _ The only one that hadn't gone to BTS, Jeongyeon thinks, with a hint of bitterness. But she manages to smile at him, and nod her head politely.

"You too," she says, and when she praises him she's surprised to find that she's being honest. "Your performance was really good."

He smiles at her then, cheeks rounding and eyes sparkling. It still makes Jeongyeon's blood rush to the surface of her skin.

"How have you been?" he asks. As if they're friends, or even just acquaintances. As if they haven't seen the ugliest sides of each other and wielded them as weapons. Jeongyeon stares at him for a long, hard moment.

"What do you want, Jimin?"

The cheery facade flickers, for just a second. Then it's back to perfectly poised Jimin. But Jeongyeon's seen the moment of vulnerability. Even during all the time they were together, that was a rare sight.

"I just want us to be friends again," Jimin says.

Jeongyeon bites down a laugh of derision. "Why?" She doesn't point out that they had never been friends before.

Jimin frowns. "I didn't mean to hurt you." That's not an answer to her question, but Jeongyeon finds she doesn't care to hear what he has to say anyway.

"Doesn't matter," she replies. "You still broke my heart."

This, for some reason, makes Jimin smile wryly. She still can't tell what he's thinking, what he's feeling. Being around him has always felt like being slightly off-balance.

"You broke my heart, too."

Jeongyeon doesn't know what to say. She stares silently at Jimin as he says her name in goodbye, and walks away.

Later, at the after-party, she bumps into him on her way back from the bathrooms. She pretends she doesn't remember who made the first move, but she knows — she was the one who let her gaze flick to his lips, and the one who stepped closer to him, and the one who whispered 'kiss me' like a prayer. (In this, like in all things, she is complicit in her own downfall.)

  
  


* * *

  
  


Technically, he was the one who broke up with her. But she was the one who made it happen. 

(She was still young then, too young to realise that just because people don't care about you in the way you want, doesn't mean they don't care at all.)

It took him a week after returning from his tour to come see her. That was her test, and he'd failed. So, when he turned up at her door, she greeted him icily and waited for him to ask what's wrong.

Here are the words she had been rehearsing, in her mind, in the hours it had taken for him to arrive: "I don't feel like I'm your top priority."

Here's what she'd thought he would say: "I'm sorry." And also, "I love you."

What he said instead, sitting across from her on the sofa, was, "You're not."

For a moment, she thought that maybe she had misheard. But she hadn't. And he didn't even look sorry about it.

"My job, my career. My group," he said, slowly. "That will always be the most important thing to me."

Maybe if Jeongyeon had been older, and wiser, and more comfortable with herself, she would have heard this for the statement of fact that it was. Instead, she heard a rejection, and her armour closed around her.

"I don't want to be with someone who doesn't see me as their top priority."

Jimin just looked at her. "It doesn't mean I don't love you."

She tore her gazy away from him. "Sure feels like it." Her words hurt, and she knew it. But if she'd thought hurting him would make her feel better, she was once again desperately wrong.

"If that's what you need — I can't be that for you." His voice was perfectly calm. She couldn't pick up even the slightest trace of emotion in it. If he'd just given her a little bit of  _ something,  _ just the tiniest scrap, maybe she wouldn't have kept pushing. 

Or maybe she would have. 

She'll never know.

At the time, all she did was shrug. "Then I'll find someone else."

He was silent for such a long time, that when he finally spoke again it cut through her like a knife.

"Maybe we should break up."

She was expecting it, had been cornering him into this, but still it managed to shock her. She turned to him, wondering if she was as steely-faced as him right now.

"Fine," she said. "Then just go."

So he did. And she sat stonily on the sofa, as the girls poured out of their rooms and engulfed her in hugs, and wondered when she stopped being able to feel anything at all.

  
  


* * *

  
  


When Jeongyeon gets home, the only person awake is Nayeon. Sitting at the kitchen table, happily munching on her cereal as she gives Jeongyeon a knowing look — a look which Jeongyeon pointedly ignores in favour of pouring herself a glass of orange juice.

"You stayed out last night," Nayeon says breezily, like she's commenting on the weather. But the devious glint in her eyes says otherwise. 

"Astute observation." Jeongyeon sits down at the table, across from Nayeon, and sips at her juice.

Nayeon smirks. "And who did you stay with, may I ask?"

Jeongyeon rolls her eyes and kicks Nayeon under the table. "You already know," she says sharply. "Don't be annoying."

Nayeon kicks back. "I wouldn't have to be annoying if you would just tell me what's going on with you and Jimin." 

"Nothing's going on," Jeongyeon replies. Nayeon scoffs as if to say, 'yeah, right', and Jeongyeon heaves a sigh. "I don't know, okay? We're sleeping together again but I don't know what that means. If that means anything."

"So?" Nayeon tosses her hair behind her shoulder, more glamorously than her fluffy bunny headband and Pororo pyjamas warrant. "It's been a month. Just ask him."

Jeongyeon scoffs, and shakes her head. "No."

"Why?"

"Because." Jeongyeon scrunches up her nose. "I don't want to know."

Nayeon makes a face. She's clearly about to say something, when Jeongyeon's phone pings. Nayeon snatches the phone off the table, eyes scanning the notification gleefully. 

"Look," Nayeon declares, shoving the phone into Jeongyeon's face. There's a message from Jimin.  _ Let me know that you got home safe,  _ it reads. Nayeon purses her lips and raises both eyebrows like she's proved her point. "He's worried about you. He likes you."

"You're jumping to conclusions," Jeongyeon replies flatly, "and I'm going back to bed." She grabs her phone from Nayeon and stomps towards her room. Nayeon laughs, but lets her go.

Momo's still asleep in their room. Jeongyeon leaves the light off and climbs quietly into bed. She sits there for a moment, before unlocking her phone. The screen is piercingly bright in the darkness. She squints at Jimin's message as her eyes slowly adjust.

Maybe she does want to know where she stands with him, she thinks — as if curiosity is the only reason why she's tempted. She supposes Nayeon has a point about Jimin liking her. Not to mention, Jimin wouldn't have asked her out to dinner if he didn't have at least some sort of feelings for her. (Not that Jeongyeon's ever going to tell Nayeon about that.)

So, before she can overthink herself into a frenzy, she taps out a message in response:  _ Is the dinner invitation still open?  _

But she hesitates sending it. Just stares at the message she's typed out, at the little cursor blinking at her. Disappearing, then coming back, then disappearing again. An endless, repeating cycle.

Her finger hovers over the send button.

* * *

_And please don't stir it up_ __  
_I'm sure it's nothing but some heartburn, baby_ _  
_ _And I'm happy not knowing_

— Carly Rae Jepsen, ‘Happy Not Knowing’

**Author's Note:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/saturnalyia)


End file.
